Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists. It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information. It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country–or around the world–are saying. If you want to write for UV, please read this. More about UV here.

We’re Talking About…

July 01, 2010

The Redemption of Elizabeth Gilbert

LIKE MANY WOMEN, my reaction — or shall we say relationship? — to Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut bestseller Eat Pray Love (first published and 2006 and by 2008 a global sensation) was complicated. On the one hand, the book is mildly embarrassing; Eat Pray Love falls squarely in the chick [...]

June 14, 2010

New Book

Missing Half the Story
Journalism as if Gender Matters
(edited by Kalpana Sharma)
INR 395
ISBN 9788189884833
Published by Zubaan Books and available from their website.
Toilets, trees and gender? Can there be a connection? Is there a gender angle to a business story? Is gender in politics only about how many women get elected to parliament? Is osteoporosis a women’s [...]

December 17, 2009

Crime Non-Fiction

By Sridala Swami

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY devoured every one of the three books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, you have at least heard of it: the story of the girl with the dragon tattoo who plays with fire or kicks the hornet’s nest. She is Lisbeth Salander, abused child, accused adult and unlikely crusader along [...]

November 16, 2009

Dirty Picture

By Sanyukta Saha
IQBAL HASAN’S PAINTING of a young woman sitting on a chair with an older woman standing beside her makes for the cover of Anuradha Marwah’s third and latest novel Dirty Picture. As a reader and someone who has seen these paintings in a plush Lahore restaurant called The Cuckoo’s [...]

October 05, 2009

It’s A Bad Ad World

LATELY, WHILE CHANNEL SURFING, I came across two advertisements, prominently aired in prime time slots that went something like this:
Ad 1: A little girl whines about how her hair isn’t as long as her mother’s was in her childhood. The mother apologetically mentions that she has to work while Nani (her own mother) was “at [...]

June 30, 2009

The Fear of Feminism

ON A RECENT VISIT to a Ivy League university in the US with scholars from across the Global South, we came across something strange. A book on feminism from its library had a bizarre tag pasted on it. The tag was brought to our notice by Elizabeth Weed, one of the editors of the acclaimed [...]

June 12, 2009

Remembering Kamala Das

ONE OF INDIA’S most beloved writers, Kamala Das, passed away after a long illness on the morning of May 31  2009. A poet and memoirist, she died at the age of 75, after a long and conflicted career.
Predictably, many of the obituaries focused on the more controversial aspects of her writing and life, particularly where [...]

April 05, 2009

Escape

WHERE EVERY FAMILY wants a hundred sons, but not even one daughter, where infant girls are killed using many ingenious methods, or even simpler, not allowed to be born, in such a land, what is the future of womankind?
Manjula Padmanabhan’s recently published novel, Escape is the dystopian vision of such a society where the no-girls [...]

March 09, 2009

“Frida To Sharanya”

Sleep wherever is most convenient for you.
Whoever and whatever is left in the morning,
take home. Be kind. All the world is yours for
the taking, long as you know that your little heart is
theirs for the breaking. Leave lipstick on their
china and on your letters. Make sure they know
that you’re a mariposa, blue as copper sulphate,
or [...]

February 20, 2009

The Secret Lives of Women

THE HADEES he had read yesterday talked about how it was Shaitan who always tried to corrupt us. If we escaped his attempts, we would surely go to Heaven. In Heaven, rivers of milk and honey flow, thousands of Houri women serve the men and make them happy. As she remembered this, she wondered, if [...]